Dark side of white paper

There are compelling reasons for the optimistic tone of the federal government’s Australia in the Asian Century white paper.

The pace of Asia’s economic growth is indeed “staggering", as the white paper says. Australia is already benefiting immensely from that growth and is ideally positioned to continue to do so throughout the 21st century.

Moreover, Asia is at peace. Despite intractable disputes in the South China Sea, the Taiwan straits and the Korean peninsula, Asian powers are clearly more focused on national prosperity than on fighting wars.

So the white paper stresses opportunities and downplays threats. It is a feel-good document, reasonable in tone, ambitious in its targets and objectives, and liberal in its attitudes. Importantly, it seeks to alert Australians to the economic and social changes transforming Asia and to encourage them to engage with Asia from their school years by learning an Asian language.

This is all well-intentioned and benign, and in long-term national, economic and security interests. But there is one powerful and troubling sub-script: the white paper’s faith in the power of freer trade and economic integration to promote peace and goodwill among nations.

And there’s the rub. The white paper sees but does not stress the dark side of international relations. Security is hardly mentioned until the eighth chapter and the tone stays determinedly optimistic. The white paper prefers not to highlight the pathologies that fester in the anarchic competition that still lingers between key Asian nations including China and Japan, North and South Korea, India and Pakistan.

We should hope that this emphasis is right and that the hopeful objectives set out in the white paper come to materialise over time. But what if the United States and China cannot manage their economic and strategic competition without clashing? What if Indonesia’s still fragile democracy is knocked off the rails? What if the gangster regime in Pyongyang starts to rattle the bars of its cage?

How easily will Australia be able to retain its liberal democratic commitments to human rights, open society and humanitarian values as it seeks deeper economic and social integration with China, the great and rising regional power, which remains deeply authoritarian with a rising military budget and an apparent addiction to global cyber-espionage? Things may prove far more fraught than the white paper wants to emphasise.

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It is still a popular notion among economists that more free trade means more peace and amity among nations, that war is so bad for business that it is now quite irrational. This argument was famously made in 1909 by Norman Angell in his book The Great Illusion – but neither trade and financial integration, nor economic interdependence, nor moral disquiet, prevented the outbreak of the First World War.

These concerns do not fatally undermine the white paper. It certainly shows Australia’s aspiration to be a good and engaged international citizen as it prepares to take its two-year seat on the United Nations Security Council. That is no bad thing.

Moreover it notes that the new defence white paper, due in the first quarter of next year, will “set out in more detail the role we will play with regard to defence and security throughout our region".

Regardless of its success in deepening and broadening engagement with Asia, Australia faces a problem of declining relative economic and strategic weight as the populations of Asian nations grow faster than the Australian population. The problem was identified by the late Coral Bell in her monograph Living with Giants and it remains a challenge for foreign and defence policy planners.

The program outlined in the white paper, if it can be achieved, might at least point towards a solution to the problem of long-run national decline in the Asian century.

It would of course be naive to imagine that the white paper was motivated solely by government concerns about economic and foreign policy.

Prime Minister
Julia Gillard
initiated the white paper to put her mark on foreign policy which was
Kevin Rudd
’s the area of expertise, the Mandarin speaker whom she deposed. Gillard now owns the targets and objectives.

The question is how long her minority government will have to achieve these objectives in a world where many other powers are similarly moving to boost ties with Asia.